http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/allnews/content_objectid=13320863_method=full_siteid=50143_headline=-NOW%2DWE%2DARE%2DTHE%2DIRAQ%2DEXTREMISTS-name_page.html
[quote]THE
[quote]THE "liberation" of Iraq is a cruel joke on a stricken people.
The Americans and British, partners in a great recognised crime, have
brought down on the Middle East, and much of the rest of the world, the
prospect of terrorism and suffering on a scale that al-Qaeda could only
imagine.
That is what this week's bloody bombing of the United Nations
headquarters in Baghdad tells us.
It is a "wake-up call", according to Mary Robinson, the former UN
Humanitarian Commissioner.
She is right, of course, but it is a call that millions of people
sounded on the streets of London and all over the world more than seven
months ago - before the killing began.
And yet the Anglo-American spin machine, whose minor cogs are currently
being exposed by the Hutton Inquiry, is still in production.
According to the Bush and Blair governments, those responsible for the
UN outrage are "extremists from outside": Al-Qaeda terrorists or
Iranian militants, or both.
Whether or not outsiders are involved, the aim of this propaganda is to
distract from the truth that America and Britain are now immersed in a
classic guerrilla war, a war of resistance and self-determination of
the kind waged against foreign aggressors and colonial masters since
history began.
For America, it is another Vietnam. For Britain it is another Kenya, or
indeed another Iraq.
In 1921, Lieutenant-General Sir Stanley Maude said in Baghdad: "Our
armies do not come as conquerors, but as liberators."
Within three years 10,000 had died in an uprising against the British,
who gassed and bombed the "terrorists".
Nothing has changed, only the names and the fine print of the lies.
As for the "extremists from outside", simply turn the meaning around
and you have a succinct description of the current occupiers who,
unprovoked, attacked a defenceless sovereign country, defying the
United Nations and the opposition of most of humanity.
Using weapons designed to cause the maximum human suffering - cluster
bombs, uranium-tipped shells and firebombs (napalm) - these extremists
from outside caused the deaths of at least 8,000 civilians and as many
as 30,000 troops, most conscripted teenagers. Consider the waves of
grief in any society from that carnage.
AT their moment of "victory", these extremists from outside - having
already destroyed Iraq's infrastructure with a 12-year bombing campaign
and embargo - murdered journalists, toppled statues and encouraged
wholesale looting while refusing to make the most basic humanitarian
repairs to the damage they had caused to the supply of power and clean
water.
This means that today sick children are dying from thirst and
gastro-enteritis, that hospitals frequently run out of oxygen and that
those who might be saved can not be saved.
How many have died like this?
"We count every screwdriver," said an American colonel during the first
Gulf war, "but counting civilians who die along the way is just not our
policy."
The biggest military machine on earth, said to be spending up to
$5billion-a-month on its occupation of Iraq, apparently can not find
the resources and manpower to bring generators to a people enduring
temperatures of well over the century - almost half of them children,
of whom eight per cent, says UNICEF, are suffering extreme
malnutrition. When Iraqis have protested about this, the extremists
from outside have shot them dead.
They have shot them in crowds, or individually, and they boast about it.
The other day, Task Force 20, an "elite" American unit murdered at
least five people as they drove down a street.
The next day they murdered a woman and her three children as they drove
down a street.
They are no different from the death squads the Americans trained in
Latin America.
These extremists from outside have been allowed to get away with much
of this - partly because of the web of deceptions in London and
Washington, and partly because of those who voluntarily echo and
amplify their lies.
In the current brawl between the Blair government and the BBC a new
myth has emerged: It is that the BBC was and is "anti-war".
This is what George Orwell called an "official truth". Again, just turn
it around and you have the real truth; that the BBC supported Blair's
war, that day after day it broadcast and "debated" and legitimised the
charade of weapons of mass destruction, as well as nonsense such as
that which cast Blair as a "moderating influence" on Bush - when, as we
now know, they are almost identical warmongers.
Who can forget the BBC's exultant Chief Political Correspondent Andrew
Marr, at the moment of "coalition" triumph. Tony Blair, he declared,
"said that they would take Baghdad without a blood bath, and that in
the end the Iraqis would be celebrating. And on both those points he
has been conclusively proved right."
If you replace "right" with "wrong", you have the truth. To the BBC's
man in Downing Street, up to 40,000 deaths apparently does not
constitute a "blood bath".
According to the independent American survey organisation Media Tenor,
the BBC allowed less dissent against the war than all the leading
international broadcasters surveyed, including the American networks.
Andrew Gilligan, the BBC reporter who revealed Dr David Kelly's
concerns about the government's "dodgy dossier" on Iraq, is one of the
very few mavericks, an inconvenient breed who challenge official truth.
One of the most important lies was linking the regime of Saddam Hussein
with al-Qaeda.
As we now know, both Bush and Blair ignored the advice of their
intelligence agencies and made the connection public.
It worked. When the attack on Iraq began, polls showed that most
Americans believed Saddam Hussein was behind September 11.
The opposite was true. Monstrous though it was, Saddam Hussein's regime
was a veritable bastion against al-Qaeda and its Islamic fanaticism.
Saddam was the West's man, who was armed to the teeth by America and
Britain in the 1980s because he had oil and a lot of money and because
he was an enemy of anti-Western mullahs in Iran and elsewhere in the
region.
Saddam and Osama bin Laden loathed each other.
His grave mistake was invading Kuwait in 1990; Kuwait is an
Anglo-American protectorate, part of the Western oil empire in the
Middle East.
The killings in the UN compound in Baghdad this week, like the killing
of thousands of others in Iraq, form a trail of blood that leads to
Bush and Blair and their courtiers.
It was obvious to millions of people all over the world that if the
Americans and British attacked Iraq, then the fictional link between
Iraq and Islamic terrorism could well become fact.
The brutality of the occupation of Iraq - in which children are shot or
arrested by the Americans, and countless people have "disappeared" in
concentration camps - is an open invitation to those who now see Iraq
as part of a holy jihad.
When I travelled the length of Iraq several years ago, I felt completely safe.
I was received everywhere with generosity and grace, even though I was
from a country whose government was bombing and besieging my hosts.
Bush's and Blair's court suppressed the truth that most Iraqis both
opposed Saddam Hussein and the invasion of their country.
The thousands of exiles, from Jordan to Britain, said this repeatedly.
But who listened to them? When did the BBC interrupt its anti-Christ
drumbeat about Saddam Hussein and report this vital news?
Nor are the United Nations merely the "peacemakers" and
"nationbuilders" that this week's headlines say they are.
There were dedicated humanitarians among the dead in Baghdad but for
more than 12 years, the UN Security Council allowed itself to be
manipulated so that Washington and London could impose on the people of
Iraq, under a UN flag, an embargo that resembled a mediaeval siege.
It was this that crippled Iraq and, ironically, concentrated all
domestic power in the hands of the regime, thus ending all hope of a
successful uprising.
The other day I sat with Dennis Halliday, former Assistant Secretary
General of the United Nations, and the UN in New York. Halliday was the
senior UN official in Iraq in the mid-1990s, who resigned rather than
administer the blockade.
"These sanctions," he said, "represented ongoing warfare against the
people of Iraq. They became, in my view, genocidal in their impact over
the years, and the Security Council maintained them, despite its full
knowledge of their impact, particularly on the children of Iraq.
"We disregarded our own charter, international law, and we probably
killed over a million people.
"It's a tragedy that will not be forgotten... I'm confident that the
Iraqis will throw out the occupying forces. I don't know how long it
will take, but they'll throw them out based on a nationalistic drive.
"They will not tolerate any foreign troops' presence in their country,
dictating their lifestyle, their culture, their future, their politics.
"This is a very proud people, very conscious of a great history.
"It's grossly unacceptable. Every country that is now threatened by Mr
Bush, which is his habit, presents an outrage to all of us.
"Should we stand by and merely watch while a man so dangerous he is
willing to sacrifice Americans lives and, worse, the lives of others."
John Pilger's documentary on Iraq, Afghanistan and the war on terror
will be shown on ITV on September 22.[/quote]
Nice to see an objective opinion, too bad its not from with in the
United States, the land of the sheeple, the patriot act, and cowardly
voters who couldn't be fucked turning out to vote.
Matty
--
"If a nation could not prosper without the enjoyment of perfect liberty
and perfect justice, there is not in the world a nation which could
ever have prospered." - The Wealth of Nations, Book IV, Chapter IX
"Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this
world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or
all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of
government except all those other forms that have been tried from time
to time." - Sir Winston Churchill, Hansard, November 11, 1947
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